I thought I would take after Rob C. and do a 13 month of trading anniversary recap about my trading journey. In this recap I am including the biggest lessons I learned, what I wish I had done differently before going live, and last but not least my recommendations for new traders, at the end I also added a comparison of November 2018 to November 2019. Hopefully, this help you not make the same mistakes I made, or help you prepare to go live. I figure, it will be best to start with recommendations for new traders, so here I go. Recommendations for New Traders 1. Develop a business plan that has a vision, an overview, a trade plan (Robert H. Template is great), objectives, and an action plan with monthly, quarterly, and yearly goals. If you would like an example, send me an email and I will send you a copy of the one that I use. 2. Trade every type of strategy until you find what you are good at, and then refine it and come up with a playbook before going live. There is a link in my daily journal on page 13 if you would like an example to build off of. 3. Develop a risk management plan, and then seek someone out that has been trading live to give you constructive advice on it. Take that advice and apply it as you see fit, and remember they probably have some past experience that the advice is built on. 4. Number one in my book is “Respect your Stop.” You are going to be wrong, have hotkey mistakes, and make bad trades. One of my criteria’s for going live was to go 20 straight trading days without violating my stop, because if I could not respect my stop in Sim, then how could I think I would be able to respect it when I was live. I believe this is the reason I have been able to not let a stock go past my stop this year. 5. Last but not least, and I am sure you heard it from a lot of traders, it is a process that will take time, so enjoy the journey as you develop yourself as trader and truly get to know what makes you tick. I know I have. Recap of the last year Personal – The one thing I was not expecting once I began my live journey was how much I would learn about who I was. Andrew and all the other moderators talk about how important psychology is in trading. It is not just the psychology while trading, but also getting to know yourself and understanding why you react the way you do in different situations. It took me a couple of months, but I eventually figured out that I hate to be wrong, because in my profession being wrong can have catastrophic consequences. That is why for the last 23 years I have strived for perfection in everything I do at my job. Now introduce a profession where successful traders are wrong 40% of time and you can see I have a lot to learn. Trading live for the last year has made me a more flexible individual, and is helping me to become a better overall person. Technical – My biggest fear once going live was that I would blow up my account and not be able to continue before I could get through the learning curve; therefore, I decided to take Andrew’s advice and treat this like a business. Prior to going live, I developed a 5-year business plan, and a career plan, trading plan, and metrics to achieve over a year. If any of you kept up with my journal, you saw that I approached the last year through baby steps. I would attempt to master one topic first, then move onto the next. Below was the path I took: Step 1: Risk Management Plan – Failed at this until July 2019. Step 2: Stop Loss Plan – Mastered it in Sim, I say this because I made it a whole year without violating my stop loss (full disclosure: 1 time I couldn’t get out a trade due to platform issues, but I did hit the button to exit). Step 3: Entry Plan – This took me a while to nail down on my Orb strategies but by May I was very happy with it. When I introduced an afternoon strategy it became a huge problem and my equity took a hit, because my entry plan did not work, 25% accuracy when I took it live. Thanks to my risk management plan I was able to survive with minimal losses and have been able to readjust the entry to acceptable win rate of 61%. Step 4: Profit taking – By far this has been the most difficult thing for me to deal with. I refer you back to I hate being wrong. I would be quick to take profits, so I could be right, but then would miss the larger move. If I held on longer; however, meant I would get stopped out more, resulting in the dreaded being wrong situation. I am still working on this but having a solid risk management plan has made it much easier to deal with. Monetary – Well, I know I am not the next great trader, nor have I ever thought I would be. I am perfectly happy being the 3rd string quarterback making minimum wage, so over the last year this has not been much of a focus for me yet. The only monetary thing I really wanted out of this year was not to blow my account up. In the end I accomplished that, so after I get a profit taking plan that works with how I trade, I will look at increasing risk. I know it is crazy trading stocks not to make money, but to develop my trading skills, I think I read that somewhere once. 😊 Biggest Lessons learned 1. I hate to be wrong 2. Thinking in probabilities is a must, and I needed a lot of work in that area. 3. I am really good at executing my stop loss 4. I have sufficient discipline to execute a solid trading plan. 5. My risk management plan I developed in sim was crap and caused me to lose more money than I needed to. 1st Risk Management Plan: November 2018 December 2018 - Took same share size per trade with no consideration for equity amount January 2019 – July 2019 – was risking 3% of my equity per day to make 1% of my equity, yeah makes no sense, right? 2nd Risk Management Plan: I now risk 1% of my equity per day to make 2% of my equity. 6. The more I focus on money the worse I trade. 7. Having a business plan prior to going live gave me a road map to follow when things did not go the way I expected. What I wish I had done before going live There is only one thing I wish I had done before going live. I wish I would have had my risk management plan focused around max loss per day instead of focused around what I needed to risk in order to make X dollars. This was a huge miscalculation on my part and I didn’t figure it out until 9 months into trading, when I started to focus on profit taking and why I couldn’t get my winners to outweigh my losers. Once I realigned my risk management into a correct ratio, I started having bigger winners and smaller losers and my net equity curve finally started to move up. Comparison of November 2018 vs 2019 Item 2018 2019 Total Days Traded 15 12 Total Trades 28 9 Average Trades per day 1.86 .75 Profit/Loss % (2.6%) 1.2% Rule Violations Average per day 3.5 .6 Trades outside Edge 5 1 Net Equity Curve November 2018 Net Equity Curve November 2019 I can't wait to see what the next year of trading brings. Best wishes and safe trading to all.

Hey, did they up it to 4:1 for Canada because on the IB.ca site under USA securities they list as 25%. https://www.interactivebrokers.ca/en/index.php?f=4745&p=stk

This is a great question. I had the same experience of doing well early and then having more problems later. I am a very curious person and I am a trier. Once I know something can be done I will never give up. This sounds great for trading right? It is, but also it means that I just keep trying things when I should give up and focus on one thing! So I tried opening range brakes, I tried reversals, I tried momentum trading, I tried trend trading, I tried scalping, I tried it all! I tried going live after 6 months in the simulator and it was a total disaster. I reacted emotionally after a big loss and tried to make all my money back on the next trade and lost twice as much. So I went back into the simulator and then I tried going live again a few months later and it was better but still not good. Then I mostly traded in the sim and sometimes when things were going well I did some live trades but I knew that I wasn't there yet. I finally got to the point where I had come full circle. I had tried all the different things I was going to try and I was starting to look back at what had worked best for me and came up with what I really wanted to stick to. For me it was a matter of keeping things very simple and doing very few trades. I decided to do one five-minute ORB. No trading in the first 5 minutes! Had to wait for that first 5-minute candle that close and then look for an entry. Then I would do one VWAP break, usually after 9:45 or so, and only enter on volume. I would not do any trading after 10 am. Working this plan really helped me in a few ways. First, if I had a down day it would be a small down day. Things can only go so badly when you just do two trades. Also, this kept the fees down. So once I could do that consistently and I was getting decent results and, most importantly, it just felt like a normal thing everyday, I went live again and have been live since then. That point of going live was after a year and a half of trading the open before my job of running my small business every day so it took a while! I track my 10 and 20 day averages, focusing on R multiples not money, increasing my risk when my 20 day average is above .5R and now sometimes do another one or two trades and sometimes trade a bit after 10am. So anyway, finally deciding on two simple trades to focus on was what did it for me. And doing just one ORB and then waiting for a volume entry on the 2 min. chart for a VWAP break kept me from making entries based on reactions instead of rules.

I had a free demo from Saxo Bank for a few months. It has a 15 minute delay on the data feed. Their platform is really quite good, both the online version and the downloadable "pro" version. Because there was not real-time data, it gave me problems when I bought or sold with a market order, because it would use the actual real time price, instead of the one I was seeing. Also, I had to mute the BBT chat sometimes so that I wasn't "cheating." I found it very helpful in practicing recognizing patterns and playing with the different indicators available to traders. Have fun!

Das offers a 14 day free trial you could take advantage of. edit: There are ways to get around the 14 days if you really have to...Use your imagination or message me directly.

Hi Jas, I can easily say that I blew up a couple small accounts when I first started trading a few years ago. Still less than post graduate education tuition though 😄 I love trading because you can be wrong more times than you are right and still make money. Tell me another profession or activity that you can win by losing? Yesterday for example, I took 2 trades on EXPE, got stopped out on the first trade, but the 2nd trade I let my trade ride to get 3+ Risk Reward. I left a small fraction of shares to test my break-even point after I partialed out a few times. Even if I was wrong 2/3 times I still probably would of made money or been flat for the day. That's how I renew my vows with trading. Just respect your stops and if the trade is breaking down, please stop out early, but whatever you do, do not increase your risk (you can tweak your stop a very small bit though). I take a less initial risk to give that wiggle room. I just watched Ford vs. Ferrari and not to get cheesy but the race driver said he was chasing the perfect lap his entire life. Trading is similar, you are chasing that perfect trade and most of the time, they are not perfect but you can still win the race (make money) just don't chase the stock lol.